I don't normally get involved in media inside baseball, because 1) it's even more boring to readers than it is to me and 2) "old" media is so last season's Prada shoes, you know?

But since we're on a roll here today, what with Amato wondering why the media never bothered to cover Gen. McChrystal's cover-up of Pat Tillman's death and me writing about the self-censoring media, this fits right in.

Far too often, Beltway journalism resembles nothing so much as a high-school lunchroom. That's why, when Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel turned in his resignation yesterday, the Post eagerly accepted. (Morons.)

Weigel is a really good journalist who, although he's a libertarian, doesn't let ideology get in the way of his work. (Sorry, Dave. You have to know you're unusual, right?)

The Post brought him on to cover the Tea Party movement, and he's done an excellent job. So why is he being shown the door? Did he regurgitate false information and start a war? Plagarize? Make racist or anti-Semitic comments? Heck, no. Those things get you your own cable show!

He did the worst thing of all: He made the conservatives cry.

Remember what I said about high school? Like, omigod!

"Okay, like, there's this email list? Called Journolist? And like, this one girl named Betsy Rothstein, who is like, slaving away in a basement and probably really a little J-E-L of Dave Weigel, pumped up her hit count by posting a bunch of emails where Dave trashed some famous conservatives, including that perv Rush Limbaugh. Which got her a link from that icky Matt Drudge, and got Dave a bunch of hate mail from the right-wing whatevers.

"Okay, so Dave's ticked off and tweets something about how Matt Drudge should handle his personal issues by being more responsible, like maybe by publicly setting himself on fire. I mean, a joke, right? Funny! But okay, Dave apologizes to Drudge and Drudge responds by sending the flying monkeys after him again!

"Tucker Carlson, that smarmy little frat boy who used to wear the bowties? Yeah, I know, right? Short! Anyway, he got mad because that guy Ezra wouldn't let him on JournoList and so he decided to publish Dave's emails on his site. You'd think a grown man would have something better to do. I mean, he reproduced and all, maybe he should be home nurturing his clones, or something.

"Okay, okay, okay. Anyway! So Dave turns in his letter of resignation, and that Poindexter over at the Atlantic, Jeff Goldberg - I think he's that guy who picks his nose and eats it, or was that the kid from The Simpsons? Anyway, he, like, totally disses him.

"How could we destroy our standards by hiring a guy stupid enough to write about people that way in a public forum?" one of my friends at the Post asked me when we spoke earlier today. "I'm not suggesting that many people on the paper don't lean left, but there's leaning left, and then there's behaving like an idiot."

I gave my friend the answer he already knew: The sad truth is that the Washington Post, in its general desperation for page views, now hires people who came up in journalism without much adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training. This little episode today is proof of this. But it is also proof that some people at the Post (where I worked, briefly, 20 years ago) still know the difference between acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior, and that maybe this episode will lead to the reimposition of some level of standards.

"And like, clearly what the Carlton Banks-wannabe means is, oh, Mr. Washington Post, sir, I would never disrespect my elders or color outside the lines. Why would you hire him instead of rehiring MEEEEE???

"Um, everyone knows Jeff's, like, a total tool? Who's more of a stenographer than a journalist, and like, a lot of Iraqi civilians are dead because of his total d-baggery. Like, dead babies and stuff.

"Which you might think would bother him, but apparently not.

"But omigod, they keep wondering why we don't want to read them! Duh!

"Oh hey, what are you wearing to the party tonight?"

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(h/t CSPANjunkie)

Hullabaloo

Attorney Scott Brown said in his victory speech:

"Our tax dollars should go to weapons to defeat [terrorists] not lawyers to defend them."

"Raising taxes and giving new rights to terrorists is the wrong agenda for our country."

And his crowd is chanting "yes we can."

Scott Brown is trying to make believe he's a change agent, but really he's just another teabagger, as you can see. The Democratic firing squad is under way on the left, and what we're hearing is that it's either Coakley's fault or President Obama's fault or both for the clusterf&!k that led to Brown's victory, but pundits and readers are overlooking the role conservatives and their media infrastructure played in the process. To me, that's something that can't be ignored. I mean, Scott Brown did have help.

Dave Weigel followed the teabaggers in MA and explains that the right has something the left just doesn't have: An incredible media machine that is able to transmit their message faster and more powerfully than anything the Democrats have. Brown was able to turn to a bunch of conservative media outlets immediately, and ultimately that got his campaign off and running.

Media Outreach, Online Tactics Honed in 'Perfect Storm' GOP Win

Brown’s short campaign–he announced for the seat on September 12, 2009, the very day that many Tea Party activists participated in a “taxpayer march on Washington”–masterfully wove together traditional campaign strategy and outreach to old and new conservative media. The arc of his victory demonstrated just how the modern conservative movement can boost a campaign without generating a backlash from voters. His online campaign strategist, Rob Willington, explained to TWI that Brown focused early on outreach to conservative media and built on that with technology that let local and out-of-state activists grab a piece of the campaign.

“I concentrated on specific conservative opinion leaders here in Massachusetts for the first part of the campaign,” said Willington. “Right around Christmas, I started targeting some national political leaders, using certain hashtags, and using video.”

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In a press conference earlier today, House Democratic leaders unloaded on House Republicans for their hypocrisy on their effort to repeal health care reform. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) was almost sneering when she made her remarks:

Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, addressing reporters at a news conference with other House Democratic leaders Tuesday, called the GOP move "disingenuous" and "nothing but political theater."

"It is a Kabuki dance," she said. "The fact of the matter is we're not going to repeal health care. It is not going to happen."

Outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, cited projections from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office noting that the Democrats' overhaul will lower the federal deficit over the long term.
As a result, she argued, a GOP-led health care reform repeal would "do very serious violence to the national debt" -- undermining a central Republican pledge of fiscal responsibility.

The Republicans "will employ budget gimmicks" and "Enron-type accounting" to make the claim that a repeal of health care reform won't increase the debt, predicted Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland. "That kind of flim-flam" is what people came to expect of Republicans the last time they ran Congress, he said.

Of course it's theater. They've got to play to the base, after all and hold a symbolic vote on a symbolic bill which will never go anywhere. The repeal bill uses the term "job-killing" at least 5 times according to Dave Weigel, and of course, it's named the "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act", after all.

That title and this little act of foot-stomping on the part of Republicans makes me want to tell them all that it's nap time in Washington, hand out their pacifiers and blankies and turn out the lights.

Who will win the framing war on this one? Will it be the GOP, with their "job-killing" frame, or the Dems with their "Enron-type accounting" frame? GOP has long held that the health reform law is a 'job-killing' bill, but never put any statistics up to support that.

Also, as DeLauro notes, somewhere between the campaign and the draft of this bill, the word "replace" was forgotten. Repeal, yes. Replace? Not so much.